Diet.
Ugh.
Just looking at the word up there makes me all sweaty and nervous. It's become a nasty, evil, horrible word over the years, mostly because it seems to be able to defeat me just by being there.
My weight has been an issue for me off and on for years. Growing up I was athletic - played volleyball and basketball in HS, then volleyball in college - and never had a weight problem. I had a carton of Hershey's chocolate milk and an old-fashioned donut every morning for breakfast. (God DAMN that sounds like heaven right about now). My point is that until I got pregnant with Madison, my weight didn't even register on my list of things to worry about.
I won't go into the gory details about weight gain during pregnancy. Let's just say that a week before I delivered, I weighed more than I ever had before, and I had gained over 70lbs during my pregnancy. After Mad was born, I lost about 40 lbs, but that was it. Then I got pregnant with Kierstin. I had gestational diabetes with her, and I was careful, but still gained about 30 lbs. And then kept them, for the most part. For the last 10 years.
I have been back and forth on the issue of my weight a lot in the last few years. When I'm happy, I tend to lose some and feel better, and when I'm not, I go the other direction. Since I left my husband in August '08, I've been mostly happy. I got on a health kick and lost about 35lbs and felt better. Then something happened that I didn't expect, and I found myself in a place where I actually started to love myself, fat and all, and I stopped worrying about it. And right now, as I type this, I can honestly say that I will still love myself no matter what the outcome of my latest adventure in weight loss turns out to be.
The issue is my health. I had to run for the bus the other day, and it took me so long to recover it was embarrassing. And a broken elevator caused me to have to walk up 3 flights of stairs a few weeks ago, and I though I was going to die. Which led me to start thinking about getting my ass on a treadmill or something again, and soon.
So... all this rambling is leading up to this: I'm on a diet. Right now. And I'm loving it and hating it at the same time. It's more than a little drastic in nature, but I need drastic in the beginning. Honestly. The better I do at the beginning, the more I want to stick with it. Then I start feeling better, and the good times keep rolling, and it gets easier and easier. And this time the goal is simply to get to a place where I can be comfortable with my weight and how I look and feel, and where I don't have to count every calorie or worry about everything I put in my mouth and whether or not it's on an express route to my ass or thighs.
Diet. It's not a bad word. It's a beginning. The plan is to follow the drastic diet for at least 25 days. Follow the plan, no cheating, and keep track of my progress. The plan calls for a specific means of cycling off of the plan, at which point my anemic list of food choices gets less anemic but still ... boring. Then the exercise begins in earnest.
At that point I'll decide whether or not to keep going in that mode. I may decide to try another round of the diet, which would be largely about weight loss and less about general health and fitness. We'll see. Either way, I feel like I'm making a positive choice. I have total support from Ralph, who is also doing the diet, and the girls are excited for me despite the fact that I've been kind of miserable for the last couple of days.
Wish me luck, friends. This is going to be interesting.
